The Counterforce No. 81

It’s been a while. How you been? I’ve started a couple of these since the last one but life has been very busy. Scott Laudati & I did three release shows for his new Rainbow Road poetry collection. An excellent book that I highly recommend. The poems hit you right in the heart and spiritual solar plexus and I was psyched to read my favourite one when Emily Costa and I went on WPKN to promote the Connecticut show. New Jersey, CT, and Brooklyn, all three shows were fantastic. The thing about setting stuff up is you’re always so stressed about making sure everything goes right, that people come, a million little worries that are par for the course, and then you’re exhausted by the time show day arrives and you have to give your all for your performance, and only afterwards you’re like ‘that was so much fun, I wish we could do it again tomorrow night!’ But from decades of doing it with music and comedy, I know that if I don’t make things happen no one else is going to. It’s been great teaming up with Scott who also instinctively knows this and feels the same way. And the shows were awesome. A blast. And always the next day I’m depressed because it’s over and I want to be doing it again that night, and the night after. Keep it rolling. I like who I am on stage. The Best Video one (Connecticut) was by all accounts a success. People came out on in 103 degrees on a holiday weekend and many in the audience told me how much they enjoyed it. Pretty cool for a lit reading. Though it was all a bit of a blur for me as for the two weeks leading up to it I was dealing with a very painful pinched nerve in my neck that was bringing back some concussion symptoms as well. My chiropractor was finally able to loosen it the day before the show but it takes time for your body to go back to normal and my muscles were aching. So I have little idea of how I did, though a friend - his first time at an indie-lit reading - while giving me his unasked-for critique of everything just said ‘and you, you were in performance mode’

Along with these shows, I have been recording a bunch of music. Almost done with the new EP and recording the album alongside that, flying in tracks from around the country. On top of that I wrote a bunch of short songs last year that don’t quite fit with the tone of the album, some of them being a little strange as well. One is called Mary Goes Round Me and from that I came up with the title Myriad Little Lambs, which is perfect for this, I’ll even get to reference Minor Threat with the album cover. So two weeks ago I booked some time at another studio and went in and banged out the ten songs over two days. I worked hard and fast, not letting my perfectionist tendencies even get a peek in, and I am very pleased with what got done, though I was at the point of collapse after that

I’ve also been finishing up my next story collection which will be coming out next year. Twelve stories loosely connected by kind of being about animals in some way, it is called Animal Pharmacy. My friend RCK tells me these new stories have ‘a certain gravity’ while keeping my love of puns, references, and allusions, so I seem to be moving in the right direction. The stories are all done but I’ve spent a month or so now polishing the prose. I have an insane editing process. My publisher told me that my prose is ‘impeccable’, so at least it works. Aside from all that - and I do love all the creative stuff - I’ve been rather down the past few months. Everything just kinda seems impossible. Though I keep reminding myself that I’ve pulled off the impossible before. It just takes a helluva lot of work, a willingness to be very uncomfortable for a very long time, and a certain amount of magic. It’d be nice if something happened soon to snap me out of this

So anyway, the stuff I’ve been meaning to write about:

In 1999 I had newly joined the band Rockets Burst From The Streetlamps. My bandmates were all big Hal Hartley fans and I remember when I was going to have my wisdom teeth out going to the video store the day before and renting three Hal Hartley films to watch while I was recovering. I think they were Trust, Flirt, and The Unbelievable Truth, but I can’t say for sure. I know I watched them but I was so high on Percoset, aside from the drinking contest in Trust, I don’t remember a single thing about them. I didn’t make the connection because my bandmates were all four or five years older than me, but amongst my own group of college friends, in the year 2000 it seemed Henry Fool was always on somewhere at people’s apartments, and I was to watch bits and pieces of it many times. Rewatched it again this weekend. It’s one of his best, and perhaps the classic. Trust too, and also Amateur. Amateur and Henry Fool dealing with some very dark, uncomfortable stuff.

I think everyone should know Hartley’s films. Just for the blocking and cinematography alone. Despite his production company being called Possible Films, he uses lots of angles that seem impossible. Like, it takes a second or two for your eyes to realize what you’re seeing, and even the more regular shots are always interesting. There’s also the excellent dialogue, so deadpan it can sometimes be plain awkward

My favourite of Hal Hartley’s films is the next in the Henry Fool trilogy - Fay Grim, starring Parker Posey. It has all the Hartley hallmarks - the composition of each shot is amazing and it’s very funny. Though it’s also quite different in the respect that it’s an international espionage thriller. He even hints at the Bond theme in the music. It’s a strange one too though because it changes some fundamental stuff about Henry Fool. It seems very much a case of ‘oh, we’re going to do a sequel, how can we make it work?’ That said, it totally does, I just think you have to take Henry Fool and the Henry Fool trilogy as two separate entities. Which is kinda cool in and of itself

There’s also Simple Men which contains perhaps my favourite scene in all of cinema:

Elina Löwensohn and co. dancing to Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing. OMG when they all go into the stomp! And I love how it’s a tribute to Godard as well, the impromptu dance in Bande à Part. Godard is an influence seen throughout Hartley’s work, especially in shorts like NYC 3/94 and Theory of Achievement, which even has a Godard-esque character in it, plus Elina Löwensohn again, who is just so awesome

All Hartley’s shorts are up on the Criterion Channel and a good number of them are fantastic. Iris is an incredibly whimsical three minutes of Parker Posey and Sabrina Lloyd set to the Breeders song of the same name. The Sisters Of Mercy is a sort of making of Iris though six times longer, even more wonderfully whimsical with beautifully composed shots and delightful use of colour. I was also enormously impressed with A/Muse. The lovely Christina Flick goes to Berlin to convince Hartley she should be his next muse. Hilarious, with some very disorientating angles

Back to that Simple Men/Kool Thing dance, it seems there’s a magic formula:

90s Indie Film + Female Lead + Kim Sonic Youth song = ALL SORTS OF AWESOME

I watched Irma Vep last year and it really blew me away. This scene in particular where Maggie Cheung, playing herself, embodies the Irma Vep character she’s been hired to portray, heading out into the night to Tunic (Song For Karen)

I’ve watched so many great films since I last posted, but one in particular I wanted to mention is Last Life In The Universe. I was so impressed by this, I watched it again the very next day. Perhaps I’m drawn to solitary sad characters whom someone unexpectedly brings out of all that, but I found this film very beautiful. To look at as well, with the cinematography by Christopher Doyle, who has worked on most of Wong Kar-wai’s big ones, and has become my favourite cinematographer. The whole thing is on Youtube, I highly recommend giving it a watch:

I also watched The Linguini Incident, which intrigued me enough to buy the Blu-ray in order to see the feature-length making-of documentary. I’m SHOCKED this isn’t a bigger cult hit. As it is, most people don’t even seem to know about it, let alone have seen it. Starring Bowie, Rosanna Arquette, and Eszter Balint (from Stranger Than Paradise) and it is SUCH a 90s film. I was intrigued by it being a Bowie movie I’d only vaguely heard of and, truth be told, during the first ten minutes I thought it was going to be terrible. But then it becomes very much its own thing, operating by its own logic, with a touch of the Lynchian about it. I ended up really enjoying it. Lots of highly quotable lines, ones that the 90s missed a trick by not adopting outright though that decade did somewhat keep this film alive in spirit if not visibility. The making-of is well worth seeking out too. The story is pretty wild, a case of “the movie gods smiling in a perverse way”, as director Richard Shepard puts it. The booklet for the Blu-ray had some interesting facts in it too, such as this coming about because Bowie had wanted to do a comedy. My mind was blown to learn that he had been offered a role in Shakes The Clown and was bummed he had to turn it down because of scheduling commitments. Shakes The Clown was another film that always seemed to be on at my friends’ house in the late 90’s. Bowie also met Iman on the set of The Linguini Incident. And what do you know, it’s on YouTube as well:

I wish I could remember exactly why I wanted to buy a Dory Previn album. It wasn’t because of Camera Obscura or that the magnificent The Lady With The Braid was on the edition of The Trip curated by Jarvis Cocker & Steve Mackey but around that time anyway in the autumn of 2006, back when the Borders Books & Music website had access to some truly wonderful finds, I ordered from them a double cd containing the Mythical Kings & Iguanas and Reflections In A Mud Puddle albums

Fast-forward 13 years and with only seven cases in the United States of this thing people were calling ‘the coronavirus’, I’ve set off driving across country again to make a new life (again) in Los Angeles. Everyone should drive solo across the entire US at least once in their lives. It really does something to you, and those battles for your sanity after 2000 miles are quite remarkable, especially if you’re in the alien landscape of the desert. But that trip was terrific. I discovered the pure joy of Wodehouse audiobooks read by proper British actors and these would very much help keep me sane and bolster my spirits in the coming nine months when after mid-March I would not be in the same room with anyone I knew until a few days before Xmas. Also on this trip I got the urge to pull out Mythical Kings & Iguanas again and wow did Going Home really hit with its refrain of “isn’t going home a low and lonely ride”, although the opposite was true as I sped along our nation’s highways to my expected new life. And I love when closing songs do that thing as here, combining the title track and another song (Lady With The Braid) into something new for the album’s finale

The On My Way To Where documentary has been on my radar for a few years now, only showing at festivals, so I was delighted to learn it’s now free to watch on PBS. It’s a good film and being only really familiar with a couple of her 70s solo albums, wow, she did so much that I didn’t know about. Before those solo records, collaborating with her first husband André Previn to write songs for Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra, and many others, some of these for big films. André leaving her for family friend Mia Farrow which Dory gets quite honest about in her lyrics. Not shying away too from her mental health struggles. A fascinating woman with a gift for both words and music. And I love love love the song Mythical Kings And Iguanas, a wonderful meditation on the necessity of balancing the earthbound parts of ourselves with the spiritual

A while back one of my editors at The Comics Journal messaged me that she had just come across Mollie Ray’s giant at the comics shop and asked if I would be interested in reviewing it. It looked interesting so I got in touch with Ray, as she likes to be known, and she very kindly sent me the book. I was not prepared for how much I would love it. And be really really impressed by all Ray put into it. For one thing, it was all drawn in pen! From my review:

It’s tough to put into words just how special this book is, complimented and complicated by the fact that the pages themselves are completely silent. It is, however, very evident that the emotions, like the central character themself, are too big to be contained by mere language. giant's illustrator, Mollie Ray, does an excellent job of conveying all the sadness and turmoil that come with a cancer diagnosis. Or any major family health setback, for it isn’t until the end credits that we’re informed of exactly what we’ve been dealing with.

Read my full review here, and def pick this up if you see it

If anyone knows anyone looking for any PR for music, books, anything really, please tell them to get in touch with me. I had a couple projects pull out at the last minute recently and have some space to take on new ones